The Long Train
That whistle you hear is Jefferson's "long train of abuses" leaving the station.
Remember when we discussed the concept of a "popular constitution" that could be overridden if polls showed that people liked something that wasn't done or hated something that was?
I posted about the two law professors wrote an open letter to Biden to encourage him to ignore SCOTUS rulings and form his own interpretation of the Constitution and that concept seems to have caught on regarding the law. It seems that all that is needed for prosecution is to be unpopular with the people in charge and they have no compunction about going all Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria on your ass in service of their political masters.
This string of indictments of President Trump are based on "popular law" - not the actual law but what Democrats want the law to be.
I've read Smith's J6 indictment of Trump 4 times since it was released, and you know what is missing?
A crime. Any crime.
Conspiracy this and conspiracy to do that. We must defend democracy, and we ARE democracy. Our butts still hurt. Orange Man Bad. Really Bad. Someone called it the first disinformation indictment. Orange Man said things that he believed but we didn’t so that is BAD and he must be punished before he goes around saying “nee” to old women.
That’s it.
Saying “nee” to old women. Can’t have that. Off to Gulag with him!
It would be funny if it was a Monty Python sketch – but it is not. This is real, and for all the insanity, these Democrats are as dead serious about their positions as was the Black Knight.
All of it is a connection of random events and statements that have no logical connection. I’ve been witness to a legal proceeding where the defendant’s lawyers went through four years of emails and actions to stitch together a narrative of behavior that they claimed harmed the company – the problem being that taken in context, none of the individual statements or acts were related or proved their narrative, especially when the persons responsible for the acts were doing so as a consequence of their employment.
The defendant was literally trying to create a narrative that people were committing illegal and disloyal acts by doing their jobs as they were asked to by their superiors.
I know it sounds crazy, but it was a theory that was allowed to be argued. It lost, but there were consequences for the people involved – they were subjected to legal fees and a lot of wasted time defending themselves for just doing their job.
Read Smith’s indictment again - because after a while, you begin to realize that it is based on nothing other than what the Democrats want to criminalize for their opponents. If what Trump is alleged to have done in the indictment is the basis, every single politician and elected official since we had a government should have been sent to jail, including Al Gore, David Boies, Hillary, Jamie Raskin, and a cast of thousands.
They are criminalizing more than politics; they are criminalizing opinions.
This isn't the “show me the man and I'll show you the crime” of Beria, this, along with the arrests, jailing and prosecution of any Trump supporter who was in DC on January 6th is Kafka. It is the literal criminalization of everything. It is being purposefully done so people will live in fear for the day the Kafkaesque knock sounds on their door and they are taken away.
This is East Germany in the 50's and 60's.
This is what despotism looks like.
This is Jefferson’s “long train of abuses” leaving the station.
I too heard, via radio, lawyers debating this indictment against President Trump, and they agreed that this is an indictment against Opinion... They are also stating that should this make it to SCOTUS, that it would get shot down and probably by a large majority. However, the damage will have been done.
The lawyers go onto to state that the process becomes the punishment, only their ongoing opinion is that this may backfire by turning those that are currently neutral now going towards Trump.
Lastly, they are also stating that this is Smith's investigation, and thereby keeping Biden and Garland at arm's length given the upcoming presidential election. If this all goes to crap, which is the general impression by many lawyers, then Biden and Garland can say that they were not involved.
Bottom line is exactly as you state, Michael, this is trying to find a crime/punishment for anything that is not Their rule, regardless of constitutional law.
My 2 cents.
And gone is any notion of “presumption of innocence” with the TDS-afflicted greeting every new indictment as if it were in itself a “conviction accompli!” Likewise Nasty Pelosi’s absurd exultation “Trump has been impeached! And his impeachment is forever!” And then Senator Kamala Harris’s absurd statement during the Kavanaugh hearings that a presumption of innocence and need for proof of the allegations against him were not germane to a Senate confirmation hearing! This is the Jacobin madness of the French Revolution.